How Should You Staff Your Content Marketing Department? #MKTGNATION14

Editor’s note: Meet Skyword’s team on the ground at Marketing Nation Summit by visiting booth 186. For more highlights from #MKTGNATION14, check out the articles toward the bottom of the page.

The Marketing Nation Summit, hosted by Marketo, kicked off this week in sunny San Francisco, CA. The conference brings together over 3,000 marketers for networking (drinking), classes, and thought-provoking sessions.

Dayna Rothman, Marketo’s senior manager of content marketing, led one of the more interesting sessions I attended. In her inspiring session, Lean Content Marketing for Lead Generation, she covered a couple of very common questions we hear at Skyword: What should the content marketing staff look like for my organization? What are their titles, roles, and responsibilities?

It is a common misconception that you need to be a huge organization in order to create high-quality content. And Rothman started her presentation with a quote to prove her point: “Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.”

The key is to create content that resonates with your buyers. Creating low-quality content is worse than creating no content at all.

You don’t need a huge head count or gigantic budget in place, but you do need some kind of budget in order to set expectations. There’s a lot that goes into creating consistently great content, so Rothman suggested keeping these three things in mind:

Get stakeholder buy-in

Appoint an executive editor

Invest in content creators (outsourced and in-house)

But, if you like a little structure in your life, consider appointing the following positions and responsibilities to forward your content marketing efforts:

Chief Content Officer

This person leads the content marketing strategy. This type of executive leadership is in charge of budgeting, audience development, approvals on design, and listening to customers and influencers on social media and other channels. At Marketo, this is the vice president of product marketing. For Skyword’s marketing team, this person is the vice president of marketing. The chief content officer owns the story of the business. According to statistics from Skyword’s content marketing trends report, the most common title of the content marketing leader is “content marketing manager.”

Managing Editor

This person is the day-to-day storyteller. He or she is in charge of content creation, production, management, SEO, and scheduling content. The managing editor ensures that content is consistent and aligned with the company’s unique brand voice. This title can go by many names, including content development director or marketing content specialist.

Content Creators

Content contributors can be in-house or outsourced. If budget is a concern, consider using your company’s subject matter experts. These staff members represent a wealth of resources that your company has at its fingertips. Marketo has developed an incentive program for its employees and publishes a blog post every business day. The company also gives away company swag, gift cards, and other special prizes. People come out of the woodwork who sincerely enjoy writing, which shows in the content the company produces.

Building a Unified In-House Team

It is important to ensure your content marketing does not become a separate department within your company—content marketing is important to nearly all the typical business silos. Recruit internal contributors to create content for your site and consider incentives such as a free lunch, a day off, an iPad, company swag, etc. At Sydney’s Content Marketing World, Robert Rose pitched an idea of having a Content Creation Management group that runs though all the company’s departments to manage the content assets for marketing.

Furthermore, strategic planning is essential to piercing through the noise and chatter on the Web. Before you develop an internal content marketing team, you must answer a few key questions to guide your content creation program: Who are you trying to reach? What is the buyer’s journey? Do you know what topics and content formats appeal to buyers in every stage of that journey? What keywords should you include in your content to increase visibility?

By answering these questions and having a clear focus for your editorial strategy, you will be well on your way toward generating blog content on a consistent basis. But don’t expect this to be easy. Regularly coming up with ideas for an editorial strategy has been reported as one of the biggest content creation challenges. However, the more you cultivate internal talent, the leaner your content creation program will become.

Of course, a platform is essential for any content creation team. Your content marketing staff can organize content submission and publication via an editorial calendar; ensure brand alignment with writer training tools and scorecards during content creation; have the ability to analyze content metrics; and much more. Request a demo of the Skyword Platform today to learn how we can help with your content strategy and help make your organization’s content creation, management, promotion, and measurement more efficient.

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